colorless green ideas sleep furiously

I wrote the following essay for my class on ‘Art of the 60’s & 70’s’ at The New School.  The assignment was to create my ‘dream exhibition’ using 3 artists of the period. This was the most fun I’ve had writing a paper in a long time….my choices were Robert Wilson, John Cage, and Dan Flavin in a 24-hour/7-day multimedia production called ‘Light, Sound, and Time.’

Dan Flavin, John Cage and Robert Wilson in Light, Sound, and Time

The three artists I have chosen for my fantasy exhibition are Robert Wilson, Dan Flavin and John Cage – in a show entitled Light, Sound, and Time.  Each of these artists represent one of each of the three elements comprising the title: Dan Flavin’s represents light with his playful, minimalist sculptures shaped from fluorescent tubing; John Cage, of course revolutionized the way we listen to music, if not the way we hear altogether, and Robert Wilson’s experiments with time – juxtaposing extreme slowness with a visual brilliance and emotion, has been challenging the boundaries of contemporary theatre from the 60’s to the present.  The goal of this exhibition is to place each of these artists’ works in relation to the others, so that the experience for the visitor should not be one in which they are merely exposed to three artists with disparate styles who happen to be working in roughly the same time period, but one of cohesion and wholeness, a single “performance” where the qualities of each artist both challenge and enhance the others.  To that end, I have chosen works from each of them that I feel will bring the necessary elements to the gestalt of this theatrical experience.

The Venue

The setting for my dream exhibit is the location formerly known as the Brooklyn Anchorage – a vast and cavernous space that exists inside the foundational pillars of the Brooklyn Bridge.  The Anchorage served as a performance and art exhibition space from 1983 until 2001, when it was shut down for security reasons following the attacks of September 11^th.    When the bridge was completed in 1883, the space was planned as a commercial arcade, but served as a farmer’s market and playground until the 1930’s when it was walled off and used for municipal storage.

The Brooklyn Anchorage

The first thing one notices when entering this space is a sense of majesty.  The ceilings are 150 feet high, grand archways invite visitors into the various areas of the seemingly endless space, and the walls are of old, exposed brick – all qualities evoking comparisons to a medieval castle.   Tunnels and corridors go off in many directions, and many are lined with rooms and cubbies of various sizes.  While exploring its spaces, it’s hard to believe that this enormous sprawling catacomb is the same structure that looks so austere and narrow from the outside.  It’s almost as if one’s sense of space has been magically altered.  Time is shifted as well – with no windows or allowance for natural light whatever, it is always dark inside the space, allowing one to forget the time of day or night, and instead focus entirely on the art existing in this enveloping environment.  Vertical structures throughout the space resemble indoor turrets of a tower, and feature stairways and ramps that lead to the tops of the structures, and are lined with various rooms of different sizes.   Many of the anchorage’s paths and passageways crisscross each other so that there are even bridges, several feet in the air, that cross over many of the ground-floor corridors.   The photo here, the only one I could find of the interior of the Anchorage hardly does justice to its grandeur, but hopefully gives at least an inkling of what this space looks (or looked) like. Keep Reading

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